微软为降成本在Copilot中用自研MAI模型替换OpenAI和Anthropic模型
Copilot goes cheap as Microsoft phases out OpenAI and Anthropic models to cut costs
微软正用自研MAI模型替换Copilot产品中的OpenAI和Anthropic模型以降低支出。MAI模型已在Excel和Outlook中每周处理数万次请求，但占比仍小。Build大会上发布推理模型MAI-Thinking 1，声称编码媲美Sonnet 4.6和Opus 4.6，但基准测试大幅落后，仅与DeepSeek V3.2相当。AI负责人承认目标是削减并消除对Anthropic的支出。CEO暗示未来可能按用量计费，MAI为默认，第三方模型付费附加。微软称MAI使用干净商业许可数据，实际基于Common Crawl。
微软正悄悄把Copilot里的OpenAI和Anthropic模型换成自家MAI，用户可能要为更弱的AI付同样的钱。这对所有依赖Copilot的团队是个警告，现在就该重新评估工作流。
Microsoft is replacing AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its own in-house models across several Copilot products, including Excel and Outlook.
Microsoft's in-house MAI models are already processing tens of thousands of requests per week in Excel and Outlook, Bloomberg reports. Both apps previously relied more heavily on models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The in-house models still handle only a small fraction of total requests, but Microsoft wants to keep cutting its spending on third-party AI over time. The MAI models are also available in GitHub Copilot, and a proprietary transcription model is expected to ship in Teams soon.
At the Build conference, Microsoft unveiled seven new AI models, including MAI-Thinking 1, its first reasoning model. Microsoft claimed it could match Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 in coding based on human evaluations. But the benchmarks released at the time told a different story, with Thinking-1 trailing the competition from OpenAI and Anthropic by a wide margin and landing roughly on par with Deepseek V3.2.
Customers may get less capable AI for the same price
For Copilot and Office customers, this could mean paying the same amount for weaker AI so that Microsoft can lower its own costs. Microsoft's head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, openly acknowledged this plan in June: "We pay a lot of money to Anthropic—so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost." This is the same Microsoft that just argued vendor lock-in with OpenAI and Anthropic is a bad thing and that it wants to be a platform-neutral alternative.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also hinted that AI billing could shift further toward usage-based pricing instead of flat-rate subscriptions. One possible setup would make cheaper MAI models the default, with third-party models from OpenAI or Anthropic available as premium add-ons at extra cost. That way, Microsoft would pass its OpenAI and Anthropic expenses on to customers with a surcharge.
Microsoft also claimed that the MAI models are trained on clean, commercially licensed data, making them safe for businesses. But according to the technical paper, Microsoft used the Common Crawl dataset, a collection of freely accessible web data whose use for AI training is not legally settled. Every other AI company does the same thing, but Microsoft portrays its own training data as particularly clean.
来源：The Decoder：AI News（RSS） · the-decoder.com